How To Check If Your PC Is Ready For Oculus Rift

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past couple of years, you might have noticed that virtual-reality headsets are well on their way to becoming legit sources of entertainment, and if you’ve been following the VR space for a while, you might have heard of the name Oculus Rift.

Manufactured by Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014, this upcoming VR headset has been making waves in the tech and gaming world ever since it made its debut on Kickstarter’s crowdfunding platform, though that hype took a slight tip to the negative side of the scale after the company announced its price at their CES event. The headset alone costs $599, and requires an entry-level gaming rig that should cost approximately $900-$1000. This might prove to be an insignificant hiccup in the gadget’s popularity, though. There are countless VR enthusiasts out there who already own systems with specs that would put the Rift’s system requirements to shame, and are itching to get their hands on what is believed to be a big part of gaming’s future.

Regardless of the magic that is high-end VR, 600 bucks isn’t a small investment, and you need to make sure that your system is ready for the Oculus Rift before you decide to shell out your hard-earned cash. There are two ways you can go about doing that, the first being tallying your PC’s specifications with the following system requirements recommended by Oculus VR.

Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater

Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater

Memory: 8GB+ RAM

Output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output

Input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port

Operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer

If this doesn’t give you piece of mind, the company has also release a compatibility tool to make things easier. The tool, which can be downloaded from the Oculus Rift website (link at the end of this post), checks your PC against the aforementioned recommended system requirements and tells you if you need to upgrade a certain component.

Looks like it’s time to upgrade that GPU.

The Oculus Rift goes on sale in 20 countries on March 28, 2016. Pre-orders are live right now, offering EVE: Valkyrie and Lucky’s Tale along with the Rift, with bundles including the headset and a Rift-ready PC starting at $1499 to become available for pre-order sometime in February.

You can download the compatibility tool from the webpage linked below. You’ll have to scroll down a bit to find the download link.

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